Dark Pop Surrealism

Dark Pop Surrealism

Dark Pop Surrealism

Dolls are surreal, dark and today they have come to represent perfect, endless, but also lifeless beauty. I must also add “voiceless beauty” too, since a doll doesn’t speak. I have used dolls several times in my images in the attempt to emphasize the fact that a woman in many situations is seen and treated as a doll. But, if a doll is voiceless, would images of dolls speak any sort of truth about them?

When I was a child I used to be fascinated with my Barbie dolls, they were to me definitely a model of identification, an enigmatic one, difficult to place in a real space, or close to other toys: the Barbie figure would transcend the symbolic order and make me imagine a evanescent world apart, not very clear to my mind. I was fond of making dresses for my doll, and comb her hair. I thought I would become a Barbie when I would grow up, and I was in many ways right.

Many things have been said about Barbies, the main critique being that young women shouldn’t identify in this tiny, thin, perfect doll, because they would never be able to reach such perfection, including her eternal smile. It reminds me of the model of the Virgin Mary, another perfect example of unreal woman, one which real women could never possibly incarnate. So why for an artist like those in ancient Greece beauty is so important? It is because beauty goes close to divinity, whatever beauty we may invent or like to draw. Barbie’s included.

I remember I once said that “God made humans in his own image and resemblance, and so humans made dolls” to resemble gods and goddesses, and to remind themselves about their own inner divine nature: real human beings shine this way at least once in their life since we really are that beautiful.

I took this thin doll because I am that thin myself, I would make a beautiful chubby one if I was slightly fat, like the ancient Greeks did with Aphrodite, and I would not have any problems about not being able to identify with someone different than me, since fat or thin really means nothing. There is something more profound in the business of making art.

Of course in contemporary consumerist society, there is an obsession with perfection so people become anorexic, or undergo plastic surgery operations, in the hope to become “Barbie like”, so that they will be loved. We have to be careful with that. Our body is in the end indeed only a stiff enclosure of our soul, it is a mouldable shell, and it has the task of communicating our inner feelings and thoughts to the external world and to others, but we have to let that body be, because the answer to love, and to why we exist does not lie in how we may look to others, but in what grows, and develops in our deep centre.

The body, thin or fat that may be, exists, and that is why we paint it. Art, unlike advertising, is not imposing any standard on people, but rather stirring up concepts, images, and inviting the viewer to reflect.

What is often constrained, or denied all together, in this wonderful involucre which is our body, is its inside fluid, which determines our constant becoming. Virgin Mary was made divine by the catholic church, because she did not suggest any bloody labour, or sexual contamination, and with it any subjectivity.

Real women are just like that: they do not look as transforming bleeding beings, they do not appear to be monstrous behind their enigmatic and captive appearance, and yet they actually are, they do bleed.
I want to present the beautiful doll, a doll in the last stage of her liveliness, constrained by many imposing mind structures, and show her blood as a last attempt to demonstrate her real existence, her voice, and her influence on reality.

One Response to Dark Pop Surrealism

congratulations for the beautiful text, dark and pop of course. This is an original insight into this overspoiled topic, I find it more authentic and more tormented than a lot of other writings that deal with pop surrealism. Your art doesn’t seem to follow a specific trend, it overturns the meanings and the many signs of the lowbrow cultural cliches, and it travels on a path of its own.